The last weekend, Ben, Xing and I attended the Seattle Indies Game Jam! It took place at the Pacific Science Center in Seattle, where the general public watched us develop from a distance.

On the first night, we were told the Game Jam’s theme was “Unexpected Results”. Sometimes I like vague prompts because it lets me flex my creativity, but other times it could leave you aimless and uninspired. That’s how I felt at first, but Ben and I bounced ideas back and forth as we meandered out way to a thai restaurant.

We decided to keep the game extremely simple and play around with the concept in unique ways. The simplest objective we thought about was simply clicking on a chest. Click the chest, go to the next level. It’s pretty straightforward and we could expand upon that idea for forever. We had ideas where we played around with how the cursor was controlled or how to open the chest. It was great fun!

Unfortunately we didn’t have a clever name for our game, so Ben looked up a pun generator online and looked for puns revolving around “Click”. The one name that caught our attention was “One Click Pony”, a pun on One Trick Pony. It had a special charm to it and with a pony, we can give our game some personality. We got started on developing the Unity project right away and grabbed temporary pony assets from the internet. For the rest of the night, we just cranked out ideas for 100 different levels.

Usually, people would stay overnight for the course of the entire game jam. However, being experienced all-nighters, we decided to take a break from that life and have a solid night of sleep. So the next day, we met up around 1pm and got cracking. Ben worked on gathering background images from the 1910s to avoid copyrights. He also ran them through a dual tone filter in Photoshop to match our color palette. I started making some simple levels and developing the foundation of each level. Xing also joined us and sketched out our ponies and centaurs and whatever else we needed. By the end of the day, we cranked out about 16 levels. We had enough images for 25 levels, so the next day we finished the last of them. Unfortunately we didn’t do all 100 levels, nor did we implement all of the best ideas. But what we did create had a lot of heart and humor that we both enjoyed. You can play our game over at https://broomcupboard.itch.io/one-click-pony!

The last day of working, we actually worked from the Broom Cupboard house, so we weren’t there for the final presentation and judging. However, we did link our game to Tim Cullings who played through our game in front of the other game jammers. This play through was live streamed, unfortunately the video feed was cut off, but you can hear the crowd laughing throughout the game. Honestly, my favorite part of being a content creator is to watch/hear people’s reactions. So despite not winning any awards, I am very proud of our work and happy to see people enjoying themselves (or raging) while playing out game.